Posted on The Bahai Millenerian Movement.
- 04/17/00 16:53:44
My Email:[email protected]
Religion: Former Baha'i

During my years as a Baha'i, I thoroughly enjoyed the diverse fellowship, inclusive spirit, and teachings of unity and peace, all the while trying to avoid contemplating the more dogmatic, authoritarian aspects of the Faith. However, as I grew older, I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the truths I was learning through intuition and life experience with absolutist, seemingly inconsistent doctrines that discouraged genuine self-expression, individuality, and the independent investigation of truth; rather than promote ideas I didn't fully agree with, and maintain an image that wasn't really me, my only real choice was to leave. The root of the problem, as I see it, is that divine knowledge is not limited to nine enlightened Manifestations and their successors; it is inexorably intertwined into the very essence of cause and effect itself, its lessons readily and directly available to each of us through art, reflection, sensuality, and the every day business of living. To deny its evidence in these areas is to deny God Himself. Bahaism works better as a philosophy than as a religion or theocratic political system, as a world-embracing attitude rather than as an absolutist, infallible institution. Ironically, the very rigidity with which it seeks to sustain itself will ultimately be the cause of its downfall.